Collin Donnell

Four days after surgery for a deviated septum, turbinate reduction, and getting Latera implanted, I am feeling mostly myself again. I made it into the office yesterday but was still too loopy for my brain to cooperate or get much done.

I had no idea how much I would enjoy having “Hey Siri” on my AirPods. The speed and reliability of it is really impressive.

I didn’t expect a mechanical pencil to be my new favorite thing, but there it is.

Honestly, in some ways I probably find vim a little less head scratchy than getting Sublime set up.

It turns out if you’re not afraid of typing you can become kind of passable at using vim in about a day, and it’s actually pretty cool.

I’m taking my new Doc Martens out for a walk around my old neighborhood in San Francisco today to take in the weather.

Hello, handsome. My first RPN calculator. Now I need to learn all it can do. I dig the retro 70s vibe.

I am somewhat determined to get good at using an RPN calculator. You know, for fun?

I’ve written a lot of AppleScript in the last decade, but, as far as I know, yesterday is the first time I checked one of those scripts in to share with my team. So — technically — I am now officially writing AppleScript professionally.

Neat. I can now connect through VPN to my home network and ssh into my Raspberry Pi. Now I just need to think of something useful to run on my Pi.

Looking very intently at a crash log, a coworker comes up behind and whispers in my ear “something crashed” — causing me to jump out of my seat 😂

I’m considering trying to find a small thing I could do with a microcontroller in assembly for the learning experience. AVR assembly doesn’t seem too crazy…

Putting together a kit you solder yourself is sort of like lego, but with a useful end result, and with the possibility of serious burns.

I managed to solder this TV No More together without burning myself and it works! I can now turn off any TV, which I will of course only use for good 😈

Got a bit of goodies from @adafruit. Can’t wait to get into and start soldering later!

Got my deviated septum and turbinate reduction surgery scheduled for the end of the month. I’m excited and really hope it helps. The sleep stuff has been really hard the last couple of weeks.

I 👏 wrote 👏 a 👏 script 👏 for 👏 inserting 👏 claps 👏 into 👏 sentences.

I’m sorry.

Writing really detailed comments around a piece of code that you just came to understand is a really good way to solidify that. I’m getting more into a habit of adding doc comments to most anything where it might be helpful in general as well.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got. Truthfully, I still feel like I’m just starting out and I’m beginning to think that feeling doesn’t go away.

Oh and much less importantly, I guess I’d tell them to get really good at using the command line, learn bash scripting, grep, and another scripting language. And not to take things so seriously you’re not having fun. And don’t yell, even if you’re upset.

After nearly eleven years (!) into my career as a professional software developer, I think the most important thing I can stress to someone starting their journey is: keep a spare deodorant in your desk in case you forget to put some on in the morning.

Last night I made a metronome using an Arduino. That was fun! This morning a person backed into me in my parking garage on my way to work. That was less fun. So, up and down?

If you deal with log files at all and haven’t seen lnav before, do yourself a favor and check it out. I know it looks intimidating to start, but so did git the first time you tried it. It’s life changing good. lnav.org

If you can get by without sync, the current version of NetNewsWire is extremely usable. It has exactly the kind of Mac native UI I wish was more common these days. The guy who made it must have made a Mac app or two before… ranchero.com/netnewswi…

I also don’t understand how sending kids to public school from 5-18 is totally natural, but wanting to provide public education from 4-21 makes you a communist.